


A Future in the Bones

by JaneTurenne



Category: Star Wars
Genre: Gen, Post-Return of the Jedi, Pre-The Force Awakens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-19 00:00:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5948218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaneTurenne/pseuds/JaneTurenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leia Organa is a seer—and in the case of her son, that is less a blessing than a curse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Future in the Bones

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [fatalcookies](http://archiveofourown.org/users/FatalCookies/pseuds/FatalCookies) for the beta!

The air smells of blood and exhaustion, but the peculiar brand of jubilation in this room is nothing like a battlefield victory. Han Solo watches the swaddling process with a sense of awe that is new to him, and frightening, and beautiful in a way that he cannot comprehend. The medi-droid crosses the room, and places the bundle of blankets and new life into the waiting arms of its—his—mother.

Leia Organa, force-sensitive, final and only daughter of a line less ancient and noble than gnarled and ingrown, begins to scream.

*

“Luke.”

Han’s hair is in disarray. It is not, Luke notes, the usual kind of dishevelment. Luke has seen Han in situations far more fraught than this one, and his hair wasn’t at all like this. Luke considers that this may be a particular degree of ruffledness accessible only to fathers. He feels an infinitesimal pang, for knowing that this is one more experience he will never share.

On the other hand, Luke reflects, Han’s disarray _may_ just have something to do with a full day and night helping Leia through labor, and another spent as sole guardian to their infant son.

“I can’t do it, Han,” Luke says—a reply to the request that neither of them dares to speak, the one that boils down, in its simplest terms, to ‘fix it.’

“I wasn’t ready for this _with_ her.” Han is too exhausted even to pace, slumping in his already-habitual chair beside the cradle. “I sure as _hell_ can't do it without!”

“She’ll come around.” Luke’s soothing tone goes unappreciated. On the contrary, Han looks more haggard than before.

“You didn't see her.” The strain in Han’s voice is more than stress, more than lack of sleep. “You didn’t see her face.”

But Luke sees only too well—Han’s memory is so strong, the image broadcasted so intensely, that no amount of concern for a friend’s privacy could keep Luke from sharing it—and there is a reason why, as he passes the slumbering figure in the cradle, Luke touches his nephew only with the un-fingers of his right un-hand.

*

It takes three months for Luke to relent.

This happened too fast. This _all_ happened too fast. One day Han was frozen in a block of metal, the next he and Leia were consoling one another for the trauma of that lifted separation, and in the time it took for Leia to realize the consequences of that particular form of consolation, the three of them had destroyed the Death Star, freed the galaxy and committed patricide. Between the waxing and waning of Leia’s belly, she and her twin had begun the process of rebuilding, respectively, the Republic and the Jedi Order. And, incidentally, Luke and Leia had celebrated a birthday that marked, for each of them, the ripe old age of twenty-four.

Luke feels old, and too young. He doesn’t know how to carry it all anymore. He is a symbol to the galaxy. He is a leader of men. He is prophet and messiah. He is a killer. He is, barely, a man full-grown. And his sister, one of his two living blood relations, refuses to be in the same room as her own son.

Luke doesn't know whether he finally agrees to Han’s plan out of pity—for Han, for Leia, and for the boy named after the best man Luke ever knew—or because he knows, in his heart of hearts, that Leia is right. One of the two of them has to live with the truth, but it isn’t her.

Leia’s training isn’t good enough, after all, to do a thing like trampling over his memories.

It’s wrong. Luke knows that. Removing this vision of the future from Leia’s mind is wrong. She was always the better seer of the two of them, the better _senser_. In him the Force flows and ebbs and departs, always something to be fought and reached-for; in him it is a river, energetic without really being _his_ , but in her it is a lake, always still and present and ready. He has envied her that, sometimes. He does not envy it now.

Luke tells himself that he is not trying to compel his sister to motherhood as a state of being beyond the basic act of gestation. If she had turned away from her son to bury herself in work, Luke would have understood. Leia was raised a princess, after all, and royalty, Luke thinks, is not notable for its hands-on, personal approach to parenting. But handing her child off to an army of nannies while she returned to governing the galaxies would have been a very different thing than barricading herself in her room and leaving Han to teach himself, unaided, the finer points of burp cloths and diapering.

For all Han’s considerable efforts, Luke isn’t sure Ben would have survived this long if Wookies didn't have such an admirable cultural penchant towards training their young males in the arts of fatherhood. What really concerns Luke, though, is how long _Leia_ can survive—really _survive_ as the person he knew, the whole, indomitable woman—in her self-imposed exile from the world.

He has seen her, once or twice. Four times, truthfully; it’s not as though he could forget. Madness is not forgettable. Sanity within madness, the still, eyeless horror in the eye of the storm, is worse.

He goes to see her for a fifth time.

Luke still does not know what precisely Leia Saw. Even now her natural defenses are stronger than he can breach without effort, but the general shape of her vision isn’t hard to guess. The Force has its two alignments. Similar polarities attract one another; opposites fight with all their strength to spin one another to a more hospitable side. And when they cannot, they repel—violently.

The sentient brain is a paradox machine. Everyone knows this. That revelation is what broke the barrier to artificial intelligence and made modern droids a reality. You only have to look at C-3PO, Luke thinks, a machine who can prioritize his dignity over his survival in the middle of a battlefield, to understand that human-like brains are capable of not only accepting contradictions, but making themselves most at home right in the middle of them.

The paradox, as Luke understands it, is this: Ben Organa is hope, and Ben Organa is ruin.

Even a paradox too big to reconcile has not torn Leia in half. It has only brought the stillness of the grave to a woman still living. She is exactly, _exactly_ as Luke left her last time and the time before, cross-legged atop her medi-cot. Only her unbound hair moves, undulating as though she were underwater, individual follicles disturbed by the minute motion of the micro-droids that have kept her alive all this while. They move in battalions from their housings in the cot to feed and hydrate her through the skin, to stop her muscles from atrophying or even aching, before cycling to recharge and letting their refreshed reinforcements step in. Yet even that relentless moebius army cannot begin to heal her.

Her eyes follow him when he enters the room. That, Luke thinks, is a good sign. She does not otherwise move as he sits down beside her.

She has not spoken, since. He has, the other times. Nobody else has been in this room, but she could not keep _him_ out with locks. Luke had not much to say on his own accord, but has carried other words to her like water cupped in his hands. He has delivered Han’s pleas, because Han is his friend. Luke does not think that he understands friendship very well, but Han is his family now, too, by the blood in Ben’s veins. Luke has given up everything he once was for the sake of understanding family. And so he has spoken, on his other visits, for Han.

This time, all he says is, “I’m going to take it away.”

Leia’s eyes flash. She is _angry_ first, angry at the mere implication that she might not be strong enough to fight this herself, her defiance more beautiful than anything. And then her eyes flicker, and something withdraws into her as she asks herself what strength really means when none of them owns themselves anymore—when she, and Han, and Luke too, they have all begun to belong to a future given shape by the bones of a son. She asks herself what she is willing to fight for, and what she is willing to give away.

Leia looks into his eyes.

“Yes,” she says.

If she were any less than herself, he would expect her to close her eyes, to lean into him. But her lips set, and her shoulders set, and she maintains his gaze. Whatever the cost, she is going to pay it, and know what she pays. And in that moment, Luke loves her with a ferocity that is nothing like a Jedi.

He takes her hand, his left flesh-palm to hers, and wipes the memory of her son's future with no more effort than a breath.

*

“I won’t believe it, Han.”

Leia’s steps are tight and measured. To Luke’s eyes, she looks no different than she did twenty-four years ago, though in those years since his nephew’s birth, his own head has gone completely white.

Han takes her arm. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I am, but…”

“No!” She jerks free of his grasp. “He’s your _son_ , Han, he’s our _son_! How can you even _think_ that he would…”

“I saw it with my own eyes! I don’t like it any more than you do, but…”

“You’re wrong.” She is very nearly shaking. “I won’t _ever_ believe it.”

“Leia,” Han says, his voice dangerously calm. “I know that you’ve always felt guilty about being… sick, Ben’s first few months. I know you’ve always made allowances for him—always believed in him, no matter what. But I saw Vader, same as you. I remember what it looked like. I remember how it felt. I may not be a Skywalker, but I remember how it felt.”

Leia Organa was raised the first daughter of a pacifist world. No matter the warrior she became, her first instinct is always to eschew violence. She does not actually slap Han across the face. The look she gives him, however, accomplishes the same effect.

“I would _know_ ,” she hisses. “If our son was beyond hope, if there was no good left in him, I would _know_.” She whirls on Luke. “Wouldn’t I know?”

Luke Skywalker learned to live with his oldness back when he was still young. He wonders whether that is really living.

“Yes, Leia,” he says, and his voice does not waver. “You would be the first to know.”


End file.
